Friday, December 14, 2007

Don's game looked like fun. So my band is ALPG Tour. We're female, we're Aussie, we golf and we ROCK!

Our current album is Stemmadenia tomentosa. In common lingo that would be a rare species of Mexican plant but it also means we ROCK!

Tracks off of Stemmandenia tomentosa-

1. Robbins, North Carolina -- our own "Sweet Home Alabama."2. Santa Fe 1010 -- a steam locomotive of ROCK!3. USCGC Mellon (WHEC-717) -- we love the Coast Guard and this is our favorite cutter.4. Bicentennial Minutes -- a patriotic metal tune.5. Bongaigaon district -- in all of India there isn't a sweeter district. Goalpara and Kokrajhar districts SUCK.6. Nuts & Bolts -- the primal scream of Australian profession lady golfer rockers.7. Chatterbox -- a critical take on the commercialization of the news that ROCKS.

8. List of University of Essex people -- these people decidely do not ROCK.

9. Mike Erwin-- the voice of Speedy on Teen Titans and a dreamboat.

10. Grenada at the 2004 Summer Olympics -- we realize there are tons of songs out there about this already but thought we'd do our own version.

If you hadn't been following the writer's strike compulsively you might have missed that the strike took a different tone in the last few days after the last series of talks "broke down. " In actuality it's become clear that the studios are following the George W. Bush model of negotiation- "Our willingness to compromise begins and ends with agreeing to sit down at the same table with you scumbags. Don't expect anything more than that." They are trying to break the union.

Patrick Goldstein has a great piece in the L.A. Times covering this conflict.

This puts all of Hollywood on the road to perdition. That still leaves the real unanswered question: Why have the studios walked away from the negotiating table? Although it seemed hard to believe at first, the evidence is overwhelming that they never had any serious intention of making a fair deal, at least the kind of deal that, as Lew Wasserman might have put it, would've allowed both sides to come away declaring victory. There is clearly a powerful studio faction that believes that giving residuals to the writers was a fundamental mistake. Since it's impossible to put that genie back into the bottle -- not that the studios didn't try -- the next best thing would be to put a tight lid on any new media revenue streams, since they will someday become the studio's biggest new source of profit.

In the broader picture the Director's Guild and Screen Actor's Guild have contracts up soon. The Director's aren't going to stand with the writers and pretty much get everything they want anyway as Overdroid pointed out to me yesterday but the actors are in pretty much the same boat as the writers when it comes to internet revenue and residuals. The studios want to break both unions.

The thing is the "new media streams" referred to above are currently democratic and inexpensive. Writers would probably be better off to break from the studios and tap these resources on their own outside of the studio system. The studios themselves seem to be signing their own death warrant. As painful as this is to watch it's akin to a slow-motion corporate suicide. You don't see that every day.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

It's nice that USA Today has decided to be charitable and give a couple of knuckleheads from the The Politico a national platform but you'd think they'd at least vet it for, I don't know, any connection to reality before they print the sucker. "Liberal Views Could Hurt Obama." Really?

Just what are Obama's wacky, out-of-the-mainstream far-left moonbat views anyway? Why, they're all nicely summed up at the beginning of the opinion piece-

When Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was seeking state office a dozen years ago, he took unabashedly liberal positions: flatly opposed to capital punishment, in support of a federal single-payer health plan, against any restrictions on abortion, and in support of state laws to ban the manufacture, sale and even possession of handguns.

Gasp! What a crazzzzyyyyy guy.

For those part those views could be classified as fairly centrist. I would say that most Americans would share the majority of Obama's positions on anything outside of capital punishment. But that misses the point.

Obama doesn't have a left-wing problem he has a right-wing problem. His positions in the campaign have come squarely down on the side of what the Washington village considers to be moderate these days. That means that on a whole variety of issues he solidly to the right of where most of the country is on these issues. Obviously Democratic consultants have molded the man into the sort of weak mush that the Democratic party base, and the country as a whole, don't want or need.

Obama is running for President of Washington D.C. Meanwhile- America still needs a leader.